Portrait of a Young Lady

She is shown stiffly, face-on, in a closed dress weighed down with jewellery, and the museum reads her expression as indignant, almost defiant, as if she had no intention of giving anything away. Her name is lost. Tintoretto painted her around 1553 to 1555, and the picture's later journey is better recorded than its sitter. By 1638 it belonged to the Marquess of Hamilton, a Scottish nobleman at the court of Charles I, who was building up a collection of Venetian paintings, many of them bought in Venice by his brother-in-law, the English ambassador there. Hamilton fought for the king in the civil war and was beheaded in March 1649, a few weeks after Charles himself. His pictures were sold, this one went to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, and by 1735 it was hanging in the imperial gallery in Vienna.